So it has been two weeks since the beta and me and @Jak have been talking about how we can rework some of our development decisions to provide quality tests for you! This will come in the form of unofficial testing periods and will be covered in more detail below the patch notes. Also a quick note about key drops, these happen to drum up some hype for beta tests and to give more users a chance to play. Generally we ramp up the drops when we have a idea of a official beta planned, so if we have just finished a beta test then it will probably unwise to be expecting key drops.

So here we go with the patch notes..

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Mod Development

Crash reporting system for both client and server

Serverside inventory saving (WE DID IT YAY)

Refined some initialisation code in BaseContainer class

Fixed inventory race condition causing no items spawning 50% of the time

Moved host initialisation code from constructor to Connect routine (bug with virtual call in constructor)

auto'd some shared_ptr instance allocations for more clearer code

Timeout period lowered to 5 seconds from 10 seconds

Network list stability work and better transmission and processing for new key elements

Snapshot buffer optimisations

Interpolation warning tweaks

Crash Reporting
We have added a crash reporting system which will allow more detailed reports to be sent to us for analysis. This will replace the manual task where we ask you to upload your log files(in most cases, sometimes we will still ask for your log files in the edge situations).

But there are a few things you should know about the reporting system just so we are all on the same page.
The system will send us:

A dump of your system memory (this is to just see what values are set by the game and is vital for fixing errors)

A screenshot of your console window launched by NVMP ONLY (again this is the console window only, and it will only send it if the console window exists, see example below where it blacks out the screen and only captures the window we need)

It is worth mentioning that the prompts below will only appear when NVMP crashes, not Fallout: New Vegas. We have no control when the base game crashed and if you are a veteran of the game you will be used to its unpredictable ways!

There is also a box to add more information to the report in written form, if you are going to send the report, which is entirely optional, then we urge you to describe in as much detail what you were doing when the mod crashed. Try and add steps so that we can replicate the bug and see if it happens to us as well. This will help speed up the turnaround time for fixing these bugs and will improve the overall quality of the mod. Thanks!

Here is what the report system looks like when a crash occurs:

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This is the details page to see what is being sent.

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Unofficial Testing
So after much talking and with our new crash/bug reporting system, we have decided that after Wednesdaywe will be opening the server randomly for user testing and input. These tests will happen for a undetermined amount of time and may be subject to closure at any point during the test. The main reason we want to move in this direction is so that we can test features that are developed much sooner instead of implementing lots of new features and then testing them all at once. The new crash report system will also help with the diagnostics of errors that you users receive, so make sure that you submit your crash reports when you receive the prompt to do so.

With this new plan we are hoping that when the larger tests are being carried out the features that are implemented are more polished and fun to play with. We are also hoping that the fluctuation of player count on the servers in these smaller tests will show us any major bugs with the server application and hopefully avoid long outages like in the previous test. Again this is a new idea we are trialling to see how if it helps the development process so things might not run smoothly the first few tries.

Finally its worth mentioning that if we open the servers to test a feature or change and we end the test immediately, we have probably found an issue and will try to keep you updated as to if the servers will be back online that night (shoutbox will be our main method for these updates). But we are liking the concept of having no pressure or time deadlines to fix problems when they arise (we will try to fix as fast as we can, but it will be quality over time unlike the official beta tests) in these smaller tests which will lead to better bug fixes and a happier experience for @Jak!

If you have any questions about these new methods or anything in general, comment below and we will try and get back to you!

Like mentioned in these notes, hopefully some time after Wednesday we'll start up the server for an undefined amount of time. Best case scenario is that we invert our current schedule and just down the server for a day or so each week or two.

Like mentioned in these notes, hopefully some time after Wednesday we'll start up the server for an undefined amount of time. Best case scenario is that we invert our current schedule and just down the server for a day or so each week or two.